Comments
I'm 80% to the intervention, 20% to research. I would love MORE money than now to go towards researching effectiveness (I'm guessing its a lot less than 20% on the margin right now)
I was shocked though after reading the recent animal welfare post at how mixed the evidence base seems to be as to the benefits of commonly touted interventions. I'm dubious about interventions that might move a chicken from a very net-negative life to a slightly-less net-negative life. I naively assumed that cage-free was better than it seems to be. After seeing @Lewis Bollard's TED talk I kind of assumed that cage-free interventions at least probably moved chickens to a net-positive life?
I would love as well to be more certain about animal sentience and suffering, but I'm skeptical that many research suggestions I've seen will make much progress, as I don't believe we can have much confidence in sentience'pain from only observing behaviour. I still think this area deserves more than the meagre funding it gets though.
I agree with Amanda's basic thesis, but I don't think "more research is absolutely essential" necessarily means "more research is the only thing that should get marginal funding." Building an effective organization is very slow, expensive, and difficult, so even if an organization is carrying out plausibly net negative interventions now, it might be worth sustaining so there's a vehicle ready to act on new evidence when it becomes available.
This doesn't mean every animal org is too special to fail, just that functional, value-aligned orgs should be considered a valuable resource, and donors should consider the potential second-order effects of decreasing their support.
How much research is needed and what it takes to sustain an organization are hugely context-dependent, so I don't mean my 50% vote very literally. Rather, I'm proposing it as prior that should be updated with context-specific information.
For what it's worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so it's plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we won't know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I don't think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until we've solved wild animal welfare science. There's tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesn't include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely there's a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if we're uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.